Last I left you I was off to OrgCon, to become relatively advantaged in my knowledge of OrgCon. It was a great little event: Corey Doctorow looks just as be-spectacled in real life as he does in his author photos, and Lawrence Lessig genuinely moved me with his top class oration on corruption and lobbying. I also got to talk shop with Prof. Eric Faden, creator of ‘A Fair(Y) Use Tale’. What do you do when you are concerned that a lot of your infographics contain other people’s brands and logos? According to Prof. Faden, Lawyer up. I have to admit I haven’t taken that advice just yet.

Since then much has occured. I got my PhD and immediately changed all bank cards to ensure the title ‘Dr.’ was highly prominent. Those book proposals I was knocking out in November managed to hit something and I got a contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Radio silence then ensued as I have spent the last 6 months plugging away to get it in by my deadline, which I did with much grace, aplomb, and the bare minimum of anxiety attacks. More info should follow in the coming months.

Also shortly after the book contract got signed I ended up with a tidy little position at Cambridge University. I am currently managing the Faculty of Economics’ research grants and am proud to say that, as of yet, we are not blacklisted by any of the major research councils, so clearly I’m doing ok.

With that background done and dusted we come to the point of this post. As a privilege of getting to knock about one of the UK’s greatest Universities I get to hear about and attend rather interesting events. As an ‘independent academic’ such as myself this kind of thing cannot be sniffed at. So today I took advantage and enrolled myself in a course run by Cambridge’s Digital Humanities Network called DH23Things. The course looks at the impact of digital technologies on academic life and how we can use them in digital research. Personally I just went along at first to find out how to make Redditors answer my darn survey questions, but I am highly suggestible and suddenly found myself filling in the sign up sheet.

DH23Things

So here I am, and this is my assignment for ‘Thing One’ of the six ‘Thing’ programme. Incidentally I greatly enjoy a course structure that refers to its parts as ‘Things’. Especially as whenever Thing One or Thing Two is mentioned my mind drifts to the world of Dr. Seuss, which can only enhance the experience.

Part A of this task was to set up a blog, which I was quite relieved to find I had already done and been contributing to erratically for many years. Check.

Part B is to reflect on the value and role of the blog to an early career academic. Well perhaps the interesting element of it all for me is that I am *not* an early career academic. As a Temporarily inconvenienced academic I currently reside on the other side of the glass, nose smooshed up looking at all the people doing cool academic things. However my blog allows me to cultivate an academic identity, a beacon to loudly (and politely) declare ‘I am not quite done yet!’. My blog operates to present – a variant of – my academic self.

However as you may have already noted, professionalism is not something I like to encourage here, thus the blog being a ‘variant’ of my academic self. As well as cultivating my academic identity during my professional academic abscense, this blog is also a liberating experience. Writing a blog, when the majority of my writing time is otherwise spent on academic texts, allows me to exercise my writing ‘voice’. Unlike ‘proper’ academic articles and books where precision rather than tone and style is key, here I can be less restrained in my approach. In an earlier post I mentioned a couple of books that I like to refer to as ‘Academic Therapy’; Writing for Social Scientists by Becker and From Dissertation to Book by Germano. Both these writers urge you to drop the affectless dry tone of academic authority, and to find your own writing voice. It is here where I let that voice out to see what it sounds(?) like. It is so easy to let the editor on your shoulder second guess every sentence you type in an article. The freedom to write in a less authoriative, less structured space allows you the opportunity to write both without constraint, yet also for an audience. This forces me to consider what I write; to re-draft, restructure and re-phrase, but allows me the freedom to be informal. I may well be admonished for my rather flippant approach to my writing online. Indeed potentially millions (it’s not millions) of people could read this, and form an opinion of me that was not one of great esteem and educated authority. However studious research has been done and all signs do point to academics also being real people. I am of the opinion that we should not attempt to quash this discovery.

I have pondered the idea of using this space professionally to publish my work outside of the official streams of journal publication. However it is a sad state of affairs that have conspired to make me not Lev Manovich. I can’t put my ideas and articles online for free, because as much as I’d love to, the REF directs my hand. Publish or perish means that even though I am a paid up member of the Creative Commons movement, I cannot, for the sake of my academic career, give up such things for free; at least not until after the publishers have got their hands on them and let them out of embargo. Regardless there are sites such as SSRN which do a much better job of promoting my rather shaky working papers.

Whereas before I have been disgruntled at such a restriction on my freedom to self publish, now I question why I would want to. This space has morphed away from being a place for the professional academic in me. Of course when I started this blog (and in fact I ported over a lot of my articles from an even older one) I had dreams of cultivating a great reputation for my insight and prowess in my fields of study. If you look at my earliest posts, I wrote with a tone that was intended to have (though failed to achieve) great authority. However as I’ve become more comfortable with my writing, and less concerned with the medium as a substiute for the academic paper, I consider it a more playful space where I can relax with my own style. In the past I have noticed many colleagues who start blogs begin with a similar cautious, self-protective tone that implies a person uncomfortable and concerned with the image they may be portraying. Many of them lost interest because for them the experience wasn’t fun. Perhaps they would have lasted longer if they had injected some silliness into their work.

The medium itself leans well to this playful attitude. It allows the inclusion of other media and the interspersal of links out into the rest of the net. As a big fan of using media to present my research, it’s a great place to house all those videos, animations, diagrams and presentations I produce. Sometimes you can even force these upon readers by slipping them into the text so surrepttiously

that no-one even notices. These multimedia interjections may be informational at times, but they can also enhance a reader’s insight into the world of the writer themelves. In the case of this post, links and images have been used to pepper the assignment with childish pop culture references. A perhaps misguided act considering this post is meant to be submitted to a group of Cambridge based humanities researchers who, if they are even still reading, are still wondering when the insightful part of this post is going to happen.

I can’t promise anything of that magnitude, but what I can provide is the observations of someone who has struggled with the question of what to do with his academic ‘professional’ blog. These are the things I would tell myself back when I first began.

Perhaps counter-intuitively make the blog about what you want it to be, not about what you believe the audience wants. It’s easier to write in your own framework than one constructed from a haphazard perception of who your readers should be.

Links! Lots of links. Make them useful of course. Include links to papers, books, other insightful posts or well written news stories. But also don’t forget to maybe drop in the irreverent and the silly every now and again. It encourages people to explore.

Write the first draft like no-one is going to read it: Then edit it because you just did.

Ultimately the blog should be your space, your ideas, your voice, your comfort zone. It is the space where your academic identity can be defined and presented to the world. It should be cultivated of course, show the side that you want to show, but don’t be concerned if that side is not all professional.

And so ends my contribution to ‘Thing One’ of DH23Things. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed my contribution, and that I have not been kicked off of your wonderful course.

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a companion site to my project 'Digital Culture Industry: A History of Digital Distribution'. The project documents the history of digital media distribution, covering the development and impact of major piracy systems, and their role in our contemporary mediascape. The results of the research were published as a book in April 2013.

It is also gradually mutating into a personal blog. Though it aspires to high-brow status I'm doing my best to ensure it never achieves it.

*Micro Update* As of September 2013 I will be the new Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Essex. This decision was partially influenced by the fact that their campus has rabbits.

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I am a recent PhD graduate from the University of York. My interests lie in the areas of media, innovation and informatics.
My thesis on the history of digital distribution is on track to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the near future.
I am also a research administrator for the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Economics.